Shifting inmates to local control not a perfect fix

Overcrowding at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa has been reduced since the state shifted responsibility for certain lower-level inmates to the county jails in an effort to help fix the state budget and reduce prison overcrowding.
— Howard Lipin

Overcrowding at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa has been reduced since the state shifted responsibility for certain lower-level inmates to the county jails in an effort to help fix the state budget and reduce prison overcrowding.
— Howard Lipin

Eleven men, once pegged as lower-level criminal offenders, have been charged with committing violent crimes in San Diego County since a new law shifted responsibility for supervising them from state to local authorities.

Among them is Joseph Todd Hall, who was charged with murder after his older half-brother was shot in the head at their mother’s Santee home. Hall, 37, later pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced this month to a 26-year prison term.

Before the sentencing, his mother criticized the county Probation Department, expressing frustration over what she viewed as lack of contact from the officers who were supposed to supervise him.

“Joseph can’t function in society,” Carol Tesch said in a probation report included in Hall’s court file.

“He has been in and out of jail his whole life. … If only I knew he had a Probation Officer I would have called and had him put somewhere,” she said. “If Probation would have just called and verified where he was living, I would have known. That is all it would have taken and my son’s life would have been saved.”

Months before Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan — known as public safety realignment — became law in October 2011, officials throughout California warned that without proper funding it could place too much of a burden on local authorities, putting the public at greater risk.

Many said it would take only one case to reveal the plan as a failure.

But San Diego County officials said neither the Hall case, nor those of the other 10 offenders accused of crimes, including attempted murder and assault, give the full picture of whether realignment is working.

Chief Probation Officer Mack Jenkins said Hall and the others represent less than 1 percent of the roughly 2,500 nonviolent and nonserious offenders who since the law took effect have been referred to probation after serving their time in prison.

“That’s a minuscule percentage,” said Jenkins, who also heads the executive committee that oversees the local plan. “That should not be the measure of how realignment is going.”

Public safety realignment has been described as the biggest change to public safety in California in decades. It was intended to help the state cut costs and comply with a court mandate to reduce prison overcrowding.

The law requires some prisoners who complete their prison sentences to be supervised by county probation rather than state parole. It also allows some nonviolent offenders who committed crimes after realignment took effect to be sentenced to years in local jail instead of state prison.

The Governor’s Office announced this month that the inmate population in the state’s 33 prisons had been reduced by more than 43,000 inmates, bringing crowding down to just under 150 percent of capacity. More than half of the population decline is because of realignment.

On Jan. 8, Brown signed a proclamation ending the prison system’s state of emergency.

Counties, meanwhile, have struggled to keep jails from reaching capacity. In San Diego County, the average daily population at the seven jails increased from 4,632 in 2011 to 5,073 in 2012.